Scott Weiland, a Symbolic Voice of the Shifting ’90s Rock Scene

December 4, 2015 10:24 PM

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Scott Weiland, who died in his sleep Thursday night on tour in Minnesota, was a rock singer precisely of his time, the early 1990s: a vulnerable peacock with a fraught, hyper-masculine baritone, self-destructive but confident.

He first became famous with the Stone Temple Pilots, which started in 1986 and released its first album in 1992. The band’s lyrics, mostly written by Mr. Weiland, were broody, for sure, with poetic images of death, drowning, blindness; they could be direct or macabre and under- or over-written. Jon ...